A Report on the 13th Eurographics Workshop on
Rendering, Pisa, Italy, June 26-28th 2002.

By Kirsten Cater, University of Bristol, UK

The
Eurographics Workshop on Rendering (EGWR) is an established annual conference,
and this year, the 13th session, was held in Pisa, Italy, on June 26 – 28,
2002. It was organised
by the Visual Computing Group, part of the Information Technology CNR
Institute, in association with Eurographics. The workshop was also
held in cooperation with ACM SIGGRAPH, and was sponsored by ATI Technologies
Ltd., SONY, and Computer Shop.

The workshop is well established as a
major international forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences in the area
of rendering algorithms and techniques; and with it has created a real
community. It allows researchers not only to present their work but also to
forge new friends in the field.

This year there was record numbers not
only in submission, 112, but also in attendance, 145. Thus the reviewers and
committee had a tough selection, as the overall quality of the submissions was
very high, however in the end, 29 submissions were accepted as full papers and
11 as poster presentations.

Papers were spread over 11 sessions
within the three days of the workshop, with topics including colour, rendering
and tone-mapping, projective and view-dependent textures, shading and shadows,
and interactive walkthroughs. The workshop also included an entire session on
interactive global illumination algorithms; Fernandez, et al. accelerate direct
lighting computations by storing in the octree cells the fully and partially
visible light sources and potential occluders for the cell. Wald, et al. trace
coherent ray groups with quasi-Monte Carlo integration sampling to parallelize
global illumination. Dimitriev, et al. introduced a method for selective photon
tracing for moving scenes, first they trace ‘pilot photons’ to detect regions
of change, and then they trace ‘corrective photons’ for a more accurate
integration.

Other
emerging areas in the field, such as appearance capture and point-based
rendering, also provided a significant contribution to the technical programme.
Yang, et al. described a system of 64 unsynchronised cheap firewire
video cameras connected to six PCs, which warp on graphics cards only the parts
of their input images that will be needed in the final novel image, which is
composited by a seventh PC. With no use of geometry to enhance the light field
reconstruction, multiple exposures are thus visible outside of the plane of
focus.

In
addition to the full papers, poster presentations took place during the coffee
breaks between paper sessions. These included occlusion culling, Monte-Carlo
rendering and sampling algorithms, and a method for creating real-time animations of realistic fog.

The Poster
Presentations The
Certosa di Calci monastery, Pisa

Following with tradition there were
also two invited talks by internationally renowned experts in the field. This
year the lectures were given by Professor Hans-Peter Seidel from Max Planck
Institut für Informatik in Saarbrucken, Germany, and Dr. Doug Roble from the
visual effects studio Digital Domain, California. Hans-Peter Seidel talked on
‘From Acquisition to Rendering’, which encompassed his research into algorithms
and techniques for acquisition, real-time interaction and high-quality
rendering of high quality 3D models. He also discussed taking into account
characteristics of the human visual system and deploying spatio-temporal
coherence in animation both with the aim to improve rendering efficiency.

In his presentation, ‘Visual effects:
Before and After the Render’, Doug Roble described how rendering is only a
small part of what a visual effects production house like Digital Domain do to
make the image look ‘right’. He covered many of the steps from camera
calibration, 2D and 3D tracking, compositing, colour timing, computer vision,
and other tricks and tweaks of the industry, all with the aim of making the CG
image look like it belongs to the film.

However, it wasn’t all work we also had two
great socials – the first was a tour of the Certosa of Pisa that is an
architectural masterpiece and one of the most important monasteries of the
Religious Order of “Certosini” ever built. This was followed by a fantastic
dinner in a farm restaurant “Degli Omberaldi”.

Due
to the fact that the workshop was being held during the World Cup, the second
social event consisted of a football game – the Teapot Cup! The two teams,
Europe (Blue) versus the Rest of the World (Red), were formed from willing
participants of the workshop. A hard match was fought, however, in the second
half the Rest of the World went on to win 2 – 0. For both sides and spectators
the matched was followed by a well-deserved dinner in a traditional
restaurant in Pisa: ‘Le Arcate’ (‘The arcades’).

The tough gets
going!The Winners - The
Rest of the World

The Best Non-Winners – Europe

The 14th Eurographics Workshop on
Rendering will be held in Leuven, Belgium, at the end of June 2003, and will be
hosted by Philip Dutre and the Computer Graphics Group at the Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven. Next year’s rendering workshop will have a hard act to
follow. Hopefully we’ll see you there!

The proceedings from the workshop are
published by ACM Press, in the book entitled “Rendering Techniques 2002” (ISBN
1-58113-534-3).